Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Critical thinking is part of my degree in
sociology/humanities. I took my first critical thinking and Socratic questioning class right around
the time I was questioning everything about my Christian beliefs. I was right
on that cusp of realizing the Bible was not anything special and wondering what
that meant about belief in God. I do believe that that class and several following
it helped me to critically examine my beliefs and ultimately walk away from
them.

At that point, I was in a place in my journey where I was
able to receive the ideas of critical thinking and honestly ask myself
questions I would not have been able to ask only a couple years before. Before,
I could never have asked questions like “does God actually exist?” and honestly
examined that belief. Because before, the bias that said that God exists was
too strong to even ask that question. It was a question I should never ask. Not
because there was something wrong with my thinking, but because I needed that
bias to stay strong in my mind. It was instrumental to my well-being for one crucial
reason:

With my instilled God-assumption, if I answered the questions
wrong, there would be hell to pay.

We all have biases. It is the mark of a true critical thinker to always be
searching for their bias and their assumptions so as to challenge them; to
teach one’s self how to see one’s own biases. It is the mark of a true critical
thinker to constantly be trying to challenge their biases in order to find what
is true and to be able to accept findings even if they go against
previously-held beliefs.

This is far easier to do when you do not have divine
sanction on your previously-held beliefs. Or when you do not fear divine
punishment for holding the wrong beliefs.

The difference between religious and non-religious people is
that non-religious people are not afraid to be wrong. I will not get sent to
hell or ruin my life or not get blessings or displease an almighty deity if I
am found to be wrong in my conclusions about life, the universe, and
everything. I now have no eternal stake in the issues brought forward, in the
things that I question and the biases I challenge in my own mind. I am free to
accept or reject findings, evidence, and ideas purely on the basis of their own
merit and not on the interpretation of a holy book. I will not be punished for
being wrong. I will not be found spiritually lacking or in need of divine forgiveness
or repentance if my opinions are found to be wrong. As such, it's not difficult
to admit I *am* wrong and to change my mind. (As I have in very drastic ways
very often in the past 10 years.)

This is not true of religious people. There is a much heavier weight on the
shoulders of the religious on being right and being found right and making sure
one's beliefs and findings match one's ideas of what one's God says. When that
God has the power to punish you or extract repentance and atonement for being
wrong, can you see why? When you come at an issue with divine instruction from
a Being that holds your life and afterlife in their hands, you have a much
stronger need to be right and to have your evidence match your beliefs. The
divinely-inspired bias is much stronger than any other bias for these reasons.

For a specific example: the issue of gay parents. There are
quite a few biased and bogus “studies” out there that say that children raised
with gay parents have all sorts of problems later in life. They’re mostly
sponsored by religious organizations, which is very telling. The entire conservative
American church NEEDS gay parents to fail, to be inferior. If it were found
that gay parents raise healthy kids, then the conservative American church's
entire worldview would be threatened. Their entire view on "god's order
for the family", everything they base their beliefs and practices on,
everything they vote for, would be threatened. Their God would be found a liar
in their minds and they cannot have that in any way. Because if God's way isn't
true in this one thing, then that starts to topple their house of cards.
"Maybe God be found true and every man a liar" is their rallying cry. The
field of Sociology often sees religious people trying desperately to make findings
fit their conservative religious worldview on gender and family order.

Look at Answers in Genesis and “studies” put out by
Creationists. There is no way that these can be unbiased because, by their own
admission, they start from the assumption that God exists and that he made the
world in 6 days. They start from the assumption that none of their “scientific”
findings can go against what they think the Bible says. They embrace confirmation
bias as a positive thing. This is divinely-sanctioned bias at its most blatant.

Parenting is a context in which I encounter this bias often. We have decades of research that states that spanking kids is harmful. And when I present this research, in return I often hear "But the Bible says that if you spare the rod, you hate your child". That's some strong bias that is able to disregard decades of research in favor of a hotly-disputed Bible verse that many Christians don't think even says you're supposed to smack children. But when you believe that getting it wrong means raising kids that won't follow your God and might turn into terrible humans because your Deity says so, that's not an easy bias to get past.

When you think God exists and is on your side against other
sides, you will be biased. Your entire worldview depends on it. There is no way
to conduct studies in an unbiased manner when you have already reached a
conclusion on the matter before the study begins. That's not how we science. When
your pre-conceived conclusion is, in your mind, sanctioned by God and thus
absolute, you will be biased. There is no way around that. You would never
accept a conclusion that went against what you believe to be from God. Your
eternal life and the quality of your earthly life depend on you being right.

This is a very strong bias, a very good reason to uphold their beliefs, to
embrace confirmation bias. This is a divinely-inspired bias, I propose the
strongest bias in existence. And only the very intellectually-honest and brave will
be able to overcome it.

It’s true that many religious people are met with this conundrum
and they change and adapt their beliefs to fit the evidence, while still hanging onto some basic, unproven assumptions. This is why we
have a growth of theistic evolutionists and LGBTQ allies in the American
church. It’s why we have Universalists. It’s why I went from Evangelical to
progressive Christian for a while. But I would argue that if one still holds to
any form of a belief in a God that rewards and punishes, there will always be
some divinely-inspired bias there.

And I know all too well what happens when you
finally pin-point and question that last bias. That’s why we have apostates.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

"We're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?" ~The Doctor

"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'." ~ From Shall We Dance?

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one's self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - this is to have succeeded." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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About Me

Who I am is a fluid thing. Currently, I am human, mother, wife, lover, friend, student, advocate, fighter, teller-of-stories, banisher-of-darknesses, She Who Stands. My stories aren't nice stories. They are hard. They are sometimes dark. They are redemptive. They are honest and true. They are from the heart of a human who has seen pain, joy, rejection, and deep love.
Contact me at darcysheartstirrings@gmail.com